The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 27

Screen Warm soak in deep water This is, you may observe, a cross between the plots of several other Allen movies and it sticks to its brief like a limpit, which is to entertain by presenting us with a slightly absurd world upended by the sudden dose of a possibly blacker reality. Could it be that the nice old codgers are actually capable of a murderous scam? The film, as fluently made as usual, and as shrewdly played, is a kind of comedy thriller that attempts to illuminate the innate capacity of New Yorkers of a certain station to make sophisiticated fools of them- selves. It doesn't strive. It simply flows seamlessly along. These waters are a great deal easier to swim through than many others so that, watching the film, you tend to ignore the fact that you've somehow seen it before and luxuriate in the familiarity that breeds content.

Allen knows exactly what he is doing and how to do it. Of how many writer-directors can you say that? DEREK MALCOLM from here. A motley group of Asian women go on a day trip to Blackpool, bonding furiously on the way while various aggrieved menfolk follow in hot pursuit. Asian women's lives are so rarely given air time that it's understandable if the film seems to be trying to cram everything into this one shot. Bhaji suffers from having a soap-season's worth of character and intrigue to blaze through in the space of a Play for Today a middle-aged newsagent with cultural frustrations; a pregnant student-to-be; a wife escaping an abusive husband; and a ferocious matron with a wonderful line in Kenneth Williams double-takes.

Hence, perhaps, the jarring shifts of mood, from creaky fantasy sequences to raging melodrama, all with something of a cut-price (as opposed to low-budget) feel. Now here's a film that lives up to its name Tombstone, a lavishly mounted but funereal slab of a western. As Wyatt Earp, Kurt Russell heads a moderately stellar cast, with enough bristling moustaches to man a Village People convention. Indeed, the womenfolk (Joanna Pacula and Dana Delany) have little to do but twirl parasols on the sidelines. Only Val Kilmer enjoys himself much as a relishably foppish Doc Holliday.

Otherwise, it's not so much My Darling Clementine, more a mouldy satsuma. In the amiably silly Man's Best Friend, Ally Sheedy rescues a large, hyper-intelligent, genetically engineered St Bernard and he's not carrying a brandy barrel. It's not long before he starts displaying psychopathic tendencies, terrorising the paperboy, swallowing cats whole (yes, whole), and slavering lewdly at the collie next door. And judging by the way the sequel's set up, I'd guess he had a paw in the script too. Pigs, dogs Further still down the evolutionary scale comes MTV clown Pauly Shore, a comic so relentlessly arch he makes Jerry Lewis look like Max Von Sydow.

In Son In Law, a nice Midwest girl goes to LA, gets made over as a Drew Barrymore clone, and brings Shore, as her chronically zany neo-hippie style guru, home to meet the folks. They're shocked but he's a piss-poor excuse for a teen rebel sexless, drug-free and utterly unfunny. Son-in-Law is directed by Steve Rash, which is about right for this mild irritation. JR MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY Dir: Woody Allen With Woody Allen. Diane Keaton Anjelica Huston, Alan Alda 108 minutes, cert PG Odeon Haymarket.

Swiss Cottage, Barbican, Plaza, Gate etc WOODY ALLEN'S Manhattan Murder Mystery is familiar territory. If you want more you won't get it. If you like the terrain, you'll be well pleased. It isn't the very best Allen but, slight as it is, it is certainly both civilised film-making and a consistent pleasure to watch. There are no pretentions at all.

Allen, teamed up again with Diane Keaton in the absence in court of Mia Farrow, plays a vaguely twitchy middle-class New York husband who comes across what looks increasingly like a murder in the apartment across the hall, where an elderly couple are wont to bore him to distraction with their hospitality. The couple's friends (Alan Alda and Angelica Huston) become in- Woody Allen on master shots OVER THE years, because I've been doing long master shots, I've found out just through experience how to do these shots so that they're effective. The trick is to keep the action moving in the right way; to keep the camera and the actors moving, making sure that the actor or actors are seen in the correct way at the right time. There are many times when the actor or actors don't have to be seen, and you don't have to worry about it. You have to know that.

You have to sense when it doesn't really matter if Woody Allen and Diane Keaton volved, and the quartet's civilised Manhattan life of endless argument and politely repressed sexual itchiness changes into something possibly more dangerous. the camera is on that person for their biggest lines, their most effective lines. Sometimes you don't need the camera on them for these lines, and it will be just as effective, or more effective, in this way. You have to make sure that the choreography is such that they cross in and out of closer shots and wider shots at the right time. Usually It takes a while to stage these scenes.

But that's how I shoot. I go in there in the morning and don't let the actors in. I work out the situation myself my camerman, Carlo Di Palma and myself and we decide the staging of the scene. Then he does a general lighting. Then I bring the actors in and I show them where I want them to walk.

I never work with actors who question this. Of course we make certain ad justments. Certain things are guessed incorrectly. But then finally, after a long period of time, we have a shot. And then we do it, and we suck up a lot of pages at once.

So you don't really lose any time at all with this procedure. There were times with Sven Nykvist or Carlo or Gordon Willis when we would work and work and work all day long and not shoot anything at all until five o'clock in the afternoon. An entire day was spent planning. Then at five o'clock we'd shoot for 10 minutes and we would have seven pages of dialogue in the can. And that would be it, a very respectable day's work from a production point of view.

Extract taken from Woody Allen On Woody Allen (Faber Faber). Ideal home Le Ly (Hiep Thi Le) gets close to nature in Vietnam before the baddies come in Oliver Stone's Heaven And Earth churches for a calendar. A year later, the calendar's up on his wall, she's not around, and his time is taken up with a very peculiar course of serial dating. Bit by bit, it all conies together the dates, the still shots of the churches, the video footage of the wife and their Armenian driver and a story begins to take shape. Calendar works on various levels: as an emotional detective story, as a disquisition on ethnic identity, as a lament on the predicament of seeing the world and not seeing it, as perverse self-portraiture.

The travelogue appeal is also artfully, if ironically, exploited, with the landscape shots set to Djivan Gasparian's haunting duduk flute and some incongruous blues. Produced on a shoestring for German TV, this has got more ideas going for it than anything I've seen for ages from the North American independent sector, which these days is bigger on chic than on substance. Don't wait to tape it off TV. The Hour Of The Pig isn't a total porker, but its good intentions have resulted in something not quite kosher. It's a veterinarian courtroom costume detective comedy set in medieval France, where animals were liable to wind up in court on criminal charges.

Accused of murder is a pig belonging to a gypsy woman (Arnina Annabi), and the defending counsel (Colin Firth) is a bewildered Parisian sophisticate. This would be enough to be getting on with, but director-writer Leslie Megahey throws in too many ingredients for the stew to congeal masonic skullduggery, bogus occultisms, strenuously jolly ribaldry, and a host of seasoned character actors quivering their jowls with appropriate relish. It's a nice idea, and timely in its depiction of a France that Jean-Marie Le Pen would feel quite at home in. But it comes unstuck, largely because Megahey can't decide whether to do The Name Of The Rose or It Shouldn't Happen To A Serf. It's a shame to write off Gurinder Chadha's Bhaji On The Beach as merely a "worthy" project that deserves better, but that's how It looks HmffiljtfSidMlmf TSirv channel fouh filmsan umbi films production M' at'F TpMl BHAJI ON THE BEACH ISANNIE SVMONS imf BUB 3J3TJOHN ALTMAN a CRAIG PRUCSS BIKUUlT BMAMRA VsMBKLOV PAUL BARONY TORALNORRiE OTTCYOEREK BROWN WV IbV A'JOHN KENWAY lOURINOER CMAOMA ft MECRA SYAL jjK' i25 MEERA SYAL TNADINE MARSH EDWARDS -IGURlNDEH CHADHA.